BAGHDAD — The biggest obstacle to building Iraqi security forces is finding leaders who are experienced and not bound by sectarian loyalties, a senior U.S. general said Saturday.

Lt. Gen. James Dubik said Iraq should get credit for assembling a mix of competent security forces in a relatively short time and under the pressures of constant combat.

It was the first extensive interview Dubik has given since taking over last month as head of a U.S. command charged with training and equipping Iraqi forces.

Iraq’s security forces number about 360,000; the total is supposed to reach 390,000 by year’s end. In December, there were 325,000, which was the Baghdad government’s original goal. The government has since determined, with U.S. agreement, that tens of thousands more are needed quickly.

“You can’t grow a force this fast and have the right number of qualified leaders. You can’t do it,” Dubik said in an hourlong interview at the U.S. Embassy. “This is a problem now and it will be a problem for a good number of years.”

He stressed, however, that in the meantime Iraq is able to field military leaders who are “good enough” to move the security effort toward the eventual goal of taking over for U.S. forces and allowing most of American troops to go home.

“A unit may have only half the leaders that it should have, but it’s still doing what it should,” Dubik said. They are learning quickly, he said, through experience gained in the heat of battling insurgents.

“Battlefield survival — professional Darwinism — is teaching very good combat skills … that will ultimately pay off throughout the force,” he said, adding, “It’s going to take time to mature.”

Dubik said the hardest issue in developing Iraqi military leaders is not training or equipping them. It is finding enough who are experienced and who have a mind-set to resist acting on sectarian loyalties, the general said.

Nonsectarianism, he said, “is a much harder thing to get at” than teaching soldiers how to fight.

The tenor of Dubik’s remarks suggest he sees a long road ahead for Iraq, with U.S. assistance. He would not say how long he thinks the current U.S. troop buildup should continue. But he said the stepped-up counterinsurgency effort that began in earnest in mid-June is helping his mission of training and equipping security forces.

The longer the troop buildup lasts, he said, the more it will help in developing competent Iraqi forces. At some point, the U.S.-Iraq offensive will reach a point of diminishing returns, he said, but it is not clear when that time will come.

The counterinsurgency effort has managed, at least for now, to drive insurgents from their havens, giving ordinary Iraqis in some areas enough confidence to step forward and help with their own defense, Dubik said.

That happened this spring in Anbar province, in the west and more recently in parts of heavily contested Diyala province northeast of Baghdad, he said.

As a result, more people are volunteering to join the Iraqi police, for example, in Fallujah, Ramadi and elsewhere. That has been a boon to Dubik’s mission of creating enough Iraqi forces in the months ahead to shift away from U.S. control.

The process will be gradual, he said, not predicting how long it would take.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, has developed a war plan that sets a goal of attaining localized security in Baghdad and other key areas by next summer. It also envisions that the Iraqi security forces are capable by the summer of 2009 of sustaining that level of security with less U.S. support.

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